CHILDRENS AND ADULTS MEMORY FOR TELEVISION STORIES - THE ROLE OF CAUSAL FACTORS, STORY-GRAMMAR CATEGORIES, AND HIERARCHICAL LEVEL

What events from televised stories do preschool children and adults re member? In this study, we examined the extent to which 4-year-old and 6-year-old children's and adults' free recall of events from ''Sesame Street'' stories is determined by the role the events play in the stor y structure. Events varied with respect to 4 structural properties: nu mber of causal connections, status on or off the story's causal chain, story-grammar category, and position in the story's hierarchical stru cture. There were systematic developmental differences in the effects of these properties on recall. First, memory at all ages was strongly influenced by the 2 causal factors, but effects of these factors incre ased with age. Second, children emphasized actions in their recall, wh ereas adults most frequently recalled protagonists' goals and events t hat initiated these goals. Third, children's recall increased as the h ierarchical level of events increased, whereas adults most frequently recalled (causally more important) events at intermediate levels. Thes e findings demonstrate that preschool children are already sensitive t o structural features of televised narratives but that utilization of the causal-motivational structure of narratives increases systematical ly with age.